Business cards are among the least expensive marketing tools a business person has at his disposal, yet they are typically very poorly used, if they are used at all. Here are some tips for maximizing the marketing power or your business cards.

1. Carry your business cards with you at all times. This sounds obvious, I know, but you would be amazed how often a business person doesn’t have business cards on hand when they are needed. Even if you manage your contacts through your PDA and you love to “beam” your contact information to others, still keep those business cards in your wallet, business card holder, pocket, briefcase, and car.

2. Make sure your employees, spouse and close associates also carry your business cards with them. I have picked up more than one client who learned about me through a conversation with my husband, who reached into his wallet and handed over a business card.

3. Hand out a business card as you introduce yourself at meetings and networking events. Not only do people appreciate seeing the name they just heard, but putting a business card in someone’s hand as you introduce yourself engages three senses while you have their attention (hearing, sight, and touch). The more they are engaged, the more likely they will remember you, which is the point, remember?

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CD business cards have been around since the late 1990′s, but have just recently become popular with many businesses as marketing and promotional tools. They are becoming more common at trades hows, with sales and marketing teams, and some universities are using them to promote their course catalogs and curriculum.

CD business cards are small optical discs that come in two distinct shapes. The most common is the hockey-rink shape which is the same diameter as a mini-disc (80mm), with curved sides, and cut straight on the top and bottom to make them approximately the same size as a paper business card. The curved sides fit into the center mini-disc indent in a standard computer CD tray. The second shape is the rectangular disc, which has straight edges all around, is about the same size as the hockey-rink discs, and has an 80mm curved extrusion on the bottom that fits into the mini-disc indent in a computer CD tray.

Both discs will work in any CD drive that has a tray that ejects, but are not for use in the slot-drive CD and DVD drives that are found in some Apple computers. The Apple slot-drives will only work with full-size CDs and can be damaged from mini-discs or CD business cards. This limitation may have been partly responsible for keeping the CD business card from becoming popular early on. However, since the majority of businesses use either desktop or laptop PCs, and almost all PCs have CD/DVD drives that have trays with either a center spindle (laptop) or a mini-disc indent (desktop), the CD business card is now becoming a very popular promotional tool with marketing directors in the business sector.

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It is a fine summer morning and you are in a happy mood. You have just returned from a long and important overseas business trip and you have attended a number of seminars and exhibitions. As you sit down with a cup of coffee your secretary enters and hands you a stiff piece of rectangular paper. She announces that a well-dressed man had come to meet you regarding an important business deal and had left behind his business card. As you glance through the card, you are impressed by the quality of the board used to make the card. What strikes you is the superb color combination the logo and the lettering of the card uses. Your eyes are riveted to the same and you just cannot take them away.

You also recall how many business opportunities you had lost in these meetings, seminars and exhibitions just because you did not have a business card. It is high time that you got a decent one made for your company. If you search the net, you will come across many ads that are selling cheap Business card designs that you can use for your business card design. It is not recommended that you use them for your official business card. If these designs are available on the net, you are not the only smart browser and in all probabilities others must have downloaded and used the same for designing their organization’s business cards. Check the net again and go in for some blank business cards online and select one whose base color and quality of card appeals to you.

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